Theology Seminar, University of Chichester (26 March 2015)

Future Christs?: Henry, Laruelle, Žižek and the Politics of Life

Benjamin Noys (2015)

Michel Henry (1922-2002) François

Laruelle (b.1937)

Slavoj Žižek (b.1949)

‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’

Impoverished Life

Creative Paradox‘[poverty is] the possibility of all positivity, because it is lacking in all determination’ (Negri 2003: 221)

Uses of Christ

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Reversible LifeBare Life Redeemed Life

Immanent Life: Michel Henry

‘Foreign to the world, acosmic, invisible, the relation of life to living being is a relation of absolute immanence.’ (Henry 2003: 104)

Energies of LifeIf we say that a baroque façade is alive, it is precisely in the sense that it arouses in the spectator’s body an awakening of virtual movements that co-constitute its original corporeity and define it. The play on this façade, along the horizontal and vertical axes, of forces that merge or clash, the wild energies coming from the earth, channelled by the pilasters and that stretch toward the sky, multiplying breathtakingly their power under the weight of overhanging cornices that crush them, the forces that radiate out from the centre and run up against the angular pillars before flowing back toward it in order to be immobilized in this gripping equilibrium that hangs above it… These motions have their site and possibility nowhere else than in life’s embrace of oneself and in the extreme power of this embrace. That is why they are carried out as life, in the heights of its pathos. Michel Henry (2012: 103)

‘Christ figures here as nothing less than the original Living, the original instance of an eternal self-affecting and self-

revealing Life forever independent of the world.’ (Henry 2003: 98)

Christological Vitalism

‘life is understood here in its ultimate Basis as the Source and nurturing Principle of everything that is alive’ (Henry 2012: 32)

Marx & Christ

Proletariat = ChristIn Christ’s passion and in his sacrifice the metaphysical law of life is revealed and expressed, insofar as essence lies in affectivity, insofar as the blow struck against life lay bare its intangible essence, insofar as the wound made in the soft, white flesh gushes with blood, insofar as suffering reveals what it is that suffers at the very heart of this suffering, the absolutely living being of life. (Henry 1983: 74)

Heretical Life: François Laruelle

‘The Great Mirror of Transcendence’

‘the nihilism of specular purity characteristic of transcendence that, by de nition, fisplits and re ects itself flin itself.’ (Laruelle 2010: 12)

The full anarchy of Christ

It is right to rebel!Revolt, on the contrary, once considered as a priori irreducible to the phenomena of evil and suffering, compels and provokes thought to look outside of itself for a cause that is not exhausted in simply tracing its rationale from evil. (Laruelle 2010: 6)

The LivingWe call forth the ‘Living’, in this way naming humans as victims and those murdered in the cause of heresy, thereby revealing the nature of it. Their persecution testi es to an fiexperience of the human that is not natural and that is no longer humanist or philosophical; it is a heretical concept of man as in-Person and applies to all men. Laruelle (2010: 19)

Dialectical LifeWhat, then, is “sublated” in the case of Christianity? It is not the finite reality which is sublated (negated—maintained—elevated) into a moment of ideal totality; it is, on the contrary, the divine Substance itself (God as a Thing- in- Itself) which is sublated: negated (what dies on the Cross is the substantial figure of the transcendent God), but simultaneously maintained in the transubstantiated form of the Holy Spirit, the community of believers which exists only as the virtual presupposition of the activity of finite individuals.(Žižek 2009: 61)

Detached Life

Further ReadingMichel Henryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_HenryHenry, Michel (2003), ‘Phenomenology of life’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 8.2: 97−110.Henry, Michel (2012), Barbarism, trans. and intro. Scott Davidson, London: Continuum.

François LaruelleLaruelle, François [2002] (2010), Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith, New York: Continuum.McGettigan, Andrew (2012), ‘Fabrication Defect: François Laruelle’s philosophical materials’, Radical Philosophy 175: 33-42.Mullarkey, John, and Anthony Paul Smith (eds.) (2012), Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

BibliographyAgamben, G. [1995] (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Badiou, A. [1982] (2009), Theory of the Subject, trans. and intro. B. Bosteels, London: Continuum.Brassier, R. (2003), ‘Axiomatic heresy: the non-philosophy of François Laruelle’, Radical Philosophy 121: 24−35.Gangle, R. (2012), ‘Laruelle and Ordinary Life’, in Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, ed. J. Mullarkey and A. P. Smith, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, pp. 60–79.Henry, M. (1983), Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. K. McLaughlin, Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.Henry, M. (2003), ‘Phenomenology of life’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 8.2: 97−110.Henry, M. (2012), Barbarism, trans. and intro. Scott Davidson, London: Continuum.Kolozova, K. (2012), ‘Theories of the Immanent Rebellion: Non-Marxism and Non-Christianity’, in Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, ed. J. Mullarkey and A. P. Smith, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, pp. 209–226.Laruelle, F. [2002] (2010), Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. A. P. Smith, New York: Continuum.McGettigan, Andrew (2012), ‘Fabrication Defect: François Laruelle’s philosophical materials’, Radical Philosophy 175: 33−42.Negri, A. (2003), ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’, in Time for Revolution, trans. M. Mandarini, New York: Continuum.Negri, A. (2005), ‘The Political Subject and Absolute Immanence’, in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. C. Davis et al, Durham, NC: Duke UP, pp. 231−239.Q. Libet (2009) Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation. New York. http://libcom.org/library/preoccupied-logic-occupation Ramey, J. (2012), ‘The Justice of Non-Philosophy’, in Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, ed. J. Mullarkey and A. P. Smith, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, pp. 80–99.Žižek, S. & J. Milbank (2009), The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. C. Davis, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.